Vintage Base Ball

I'm hopeful our club gets a chance to come down and do that next summer. That would be so much fun.

I played for the first time this past summer on our local club and had a good time. I did it partly to help my son have fun and not be so serious with his youth baseball and in part because of that awesome Conan video. Is it a goofy? Sure, but you know going in that you're not playing Game 7 of the World Series. It's the game, just with slightly different rules.

Thankfully, I haven't taken any off the fingers too badly to keep typing things like this.

 

Jim Bouton was involved in something like this, called "town ball," I believe, in several places in New England.

 

To me, townball is totally different. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, townball, to me, means a group of guys getting together to play the regular game of baseball at their town's baseball diamond. The townball teams I watched in Wisconsin used wooden bats, but beyond that the game was played like any other. They'll play in a league and then have a post-season state tournament.

 

I've played for 5 years and it is a blast. Everyone wants to compete and win, but it is not the bottom line. Our team has players from their mid-20s to mid-60s. We have had guys get hurt, but I play catcher ("behind" actually) and have never done so.

 

This article about vintage base ball starts with someone saying a guy has his head up his ass, which they probably didn't say in 1860. The people I saw playing used a lot of old terminology while playing, although an OH SHIT probably came up when the third baseman busted his finger catching a liner:

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/63164126/

 

That may be called townball in the Midwest, but it's sandlot or twilight league most everywhere.

 

Played for the first time this past summer.

Like someone else said, a blast. An absolute blast.

Yes, it's basically beer-league softball in dress-up, but the lack of a glove makes you feel a bit more manly when you snag a liner while playing third base or rover (shortstop). The balls are a bit softer than real baseballs, but they can sting. Nobody dislocated or broke a finger this year on my squad - or at least they didn't say anything - but some of the guys who have been doing it for awhile said it does happen.

Most teams we played were all about the fun. You go out there, play the game, say some of the goofy terms and it's all good. A few teams were serious and played like they were going for championships. We played all over the place, too, which was fun.

Cincinnati apparently has a festival that is a treat, where you walk through a gate and it's like walking into 1863, with a lot of the fans getting dressed up as well. I've never been. And some teams attract way more fans than others. A game we played in Hobart, IN, attracted about 100 or so people, which was kind of surreal. Nothing like having to dive into a bunch of people seated along the baselines for a foul ball. Other places had maybe 0-10 fans present, mainly families of those playing.

A lot of teams also have buffets afterward, and it becomes a point of pride to have the best "feed bag" after games.

Some rules you have to get used to. All balls that strike fair territory first are fair, whether they go by first or third base or not. One guy we played against always tried to smash a ball into the ground and bounce it off into a field along the third-base line. During some games you play the one-hop rule, where a ball caught on the bounce is like a fly ball or line-out. You get robbed of many base hits with that rule.

Anyway, fun game where you meet lots of interesting people, including many Civil War and history buffs, which seem to be mightily attracted to base ball.

 

Then there are these photos from mid-19th century baseball:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/10/22/new_york_public_library_presents_a_g_spalding_s_collection_of_early_baseball.html